If you maintain a MapLibre stylesheet with more than a few dozen layers, you already know the problem. A color change that should take five minutes takes fifty because you need to search and replace, plus visually review, across dozens of layers. Designers iterate in Maputnik, but complain about it, meanwhile developers won't touch it — it applies edits in ways that make source control of the style JSON impossible. So instead they edit JSON by hand with a live reload and consider the visual editor part of the problem, not the solution. Nobody has a full picture of the style, version history is indecipherable.

This isn't a tooling preference — it's a workflow gap that shapes how the MapLibre ecosystem develops. Right now there's nothing between a visual editor that hides the JSON and a text editor that gives you all of it with no structure. Writing layers requires an encyclopedic and up-to-date knowledge of the style spec, superhuman grasp of how expressions work, and instantaneous visual feedback on what incremental changes produce. The WYSIWYG approach has real limits of its own: it typically generates verbose JSON, obscures optimization opportunities, and doesn't integrate with the code, reload, commit workflow that experienced style authors actually prefer.

Mapstrata takes a different approach. Instead of replacing the JSON workflow with a visual one, it makes the JSON workflow maintainable. Import a stylesheet and Mapstrata decomposes it: layers become reviewable, diffable, attributable in git. Build variants and maintain them. Iterate on changes live with a MapLibre preview pane. Export, commit, and collaborate on the Mapstrata files or the composed style JSON. No cloud dependency, no lock-in, no proprietary format.

The design philosophy is that the editor should make the underlying structure legible, not hide it. Variables use embedded references directly in layer JSON, so you can read any layer file and immediately see which properties are variable-driven versus hardcoded. The build engine validates against the MapLibre style spec on every edit, catching errors before they produce a blank map.

This talk will demo the editor, share what I know about what style authors actually need versus what we assumed they'd want, and outline where the project is headed — source management, layer property editing, and variant support for theme switching. Come to the talk and sign up to test the editor — we're looking for contributors and teams willing to put Mapstrata through its paces on real stylesheets.